 Live from Las Vegas, Nevada, it's the Cube at IBM Edge 2014, brought to you by IBM. Now here are your hosts, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Welcome back to Las Vegas everybody. This is Dave Vellante flying solo, John Furrier is taking a break because we have two guests in this segment. I love when we interview folks from Italy so we have two gentlemen here from FastWeb, Alessandro Perlino and Matteo Farrebarotti, both with FastWeb who is a cloud service provider, out of Milano. Gentlemen, it's a pleasure to have you on the Cube. Welcome. Thank you. Alessandro, maybe we can start with you. You talk a little bit about FastWeb, what the company does. Thank you. Thank you for the invite, the invitation for a year and FastWeb is a tech operator based in Milan, based in Italy, that they can offer fiber optics and copper connection to the customer, residential and business customer in Italy. FastWeb is very interesting company because they can have in the side a lot of people that they want to implement innovation in the technology and infrastructure architecture. In this case, we are born two years ago, more or less, a new project for provider to our customer, new kind of solution for tech operator. This solution is a cloud. Cloud is a strange word and now cloud is a new offer for FastWeb for our customer enterprise and small, medium-sized business society. You say FastWeb is two years old or the project is two years old? Two years ago, the project. And then FastWeb has been around for a while. FastWeb is born more or less in 1999. That's right, in the height of the dot-com bubble, you survived, congratulations. You didn't blow up with the rest of it. Okay, so before we move on to the solution side, tell me about the market. You sell primarily in Italy or worldwide? No, just only in Italy. Tell me about the Italian market. What's going on in the Italian market? You have cloud, you have public cloud, you have private cloud, cloud service providers. What's the customer doing in the Italian market? Thank you for the question because it's the reason that FastWeb, they want to implement this kind of solution because our customer, normally our customer acquires from FastWeb telecommunication, data, mobile, voice, voice over IP and so on. But frequently customers want to buy from FastWeb, from the tech operator, also a solution that can provide an innovative solution. In this case, cloud is a solution for provide very interesting, very secure architecture for implementing application and solution that normally they want to implement in-house. Customers fast in Italy are separated in two mainstream. The first one is residential, the second one is enterprise. The residential market is very difficult in this moment because the crisis are impacted very high for this kind of market. But the enterprise market are very interesting because they can spend a lot of money to implement new solution, to solve the problem, to solve the crisis, to access by this tunnel for implement new solution, to have a new market to achieve in Italy and outside Italy and Europe. Mateo, when you go to a customer, tell me what the conversation is like, what are they asking you? Mainly, our customers are concerned about the maintenance of their in-house infrastructure and they want from FastWeb a reliable partner to demand, delegate their infrastructure. Right now, we have a lot of big companies that want to outsource their infrastructure, but maintain the control over their applications and so FastWeb developed an infrastructure, a cloud public and private cloud infrastructure to insource the systems of the customers. The main aspect is the reliability of the infrastructure and the security of the infrastructure because they don't want to lose any data, they don't want that their data is shared among any others, they want that their data remains in Italy. They don't want to... They don't want to give it to the NSA. Exactly. Okay, why do the customers want to outsource? I think because it's mainly for two reasons. Because of the fixed cost, they know exactly how they are going to spend and because it's for a company that IT is not their primary focus, it's difficult to keep the base with the technology innovation. Alessandro, when the customer buys from you, will you save the money or make their IT better or both? Yes, because the first approach for our customer is to save the money, there are a lot of reasons for that, but sometimes customers want to implement solutions that can use to evolve your organization, to have new offers, new products, new solutions for the market. This is a reason for that, we have chosen for the infrastructure as a service platform that we have been fast with, an architecture using IBM solution and using the best-of-breed architecture for that. Will they ask you, Matteo, what's back at your facility? Do they ask you questions about your data center? Do they want to see your data center? Absolutely, yes. So they visualize it. So what's... Tell me about your data centers. We are building two new data centers in Tire 4 that are the only two data centers certified by the Uptime Institute in Italy, certified at Tire 4, and the customer loves them. In fact, we bring our customer at our data center to face them, to visit the structure because it's a brand-new structure and they love it because it's resilient and it has all the instruments and the cooling systems, shiny brand-new, and they want to know which technology we use to protect the data, protect their infrastructure because we sell also housing for them because not only our infrastructure has a service, but if they want, we bring their infrastructure in our new data centers. Okay, so you'll do that too. Why are you at IBM Edge? Start with you, Matteo. We are here to know where the market is going, to learn more about big data, analytics, and also the new flash storage solutions because in particular we are now developing a new service that is VDI, a VDI desktop in order to virtualize the physical desktops of our customers. And you're an IBM customer today, yes? Yes. So I understand V7000 and SVC? Yes, we have V7000 and SVC to replicate because those two new data centers are a stretched cluster, it's a metro cluster with a fiber optic and with zero latency and everything in our infrastructure is replicated. To the synchronous? Yes, synchronous, in a synchronous way. And how do you, it's Europe, so you know asynchronous or? We have a synchronous services, but for low-end customers. Yeah, right, it's a common in Europe, right, they're going to have synchronous replication. Yes, yes. And Alessandro, how about you, Edge, what are you getting at this conference? For my job, for my passion, I would like to say to know what IBM wants to implement to offer in the market in the future because my job is to achieve, to customer, to acquire the customer before the customer have the needs. So we want to, I need to understand better what kind of strategy IBM maybe have in the future to make a partnership with you about that. Great. Gentlemen, thank you very much for coming in the queue. It was a pleasure meeting you. All right. Thanks to you. Everybody, we'll be right back. We're live from IBM Edge. This is theCUBE, and stay tuned.